Altars of Spine and Fraction: Poems

Northwestern University Press, 2024

Altars of Spine and Fraction follows its protagonist through the joys and dangers of childhood on the rural Gulf Coast, through familial loss, and into adulthood. Refusing to romanticize what has been lost, Molbert instead interrogates how nostalgia is most often enjoyed by those with the privilege to reject or indulge it.

Violent hurricanes sweep across the landscapes of the poems, and Molbert probes the class inequalities that these climate crises lay bare. Moving from outdoor rural spaces in its first half to indoor domestic spaces in its second half, the collection explores family history, generational trauma, and the toxic masculinity that is shouldered by the boys raised in the Deep South.

Press

“In Nicholas Molbert’s debut poetry collection Altars of Spine and Fraction, each poem is a small map, demarcating where boyhood begins and ends. Ideas of masculinity, soft and hard, are formed in the speaker’s childhood: some brittle and prone to breakage, others weathered and gentle, and still more sharp and capable of causing great pain. In his poems, settings such as wharves, playgrounds, and linoleum kitchen floors serve as those titular altars, sacred spaces of peace, connection, and quiet. Molbert persuades us they are holy, not because they are separated from the weight of history, but because they hold the personal and the universal to account, asking the reader to judge if transformation between the two is possible, and at what cost.”

—Michael Pittard (review) in Chicago Review of Books

Praise

“Altars of Spine and Fraction offers a praise song full of the particulars of a white working class boyhood in Southern Louisiana: hurricanes and rigs, fishing and football, double wides and Swiss Army knives. In doing so, it offers too the social ecology of a rural landscape changed by fossil fuels and climate crisis, its small towns and social fabric giving way to a rising Gulf. Set against the backdrop of ‘another lane eaten/by the encroaching coastline,’ infused with ‘the funk/of diesel,’ Molbert's poems also tell the story of a prodigal son wounded by the model of masculinity his father offers. A paean to the homes we leave behind and the homes we go on to make, this book dwells in the place more central to ourselves than the self.”

—Brian Teare, author of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven

“‘We are tethered by the barely visible,’ writes Molbert, as much about the fragile coastline being erased by a relentless petrochemical industry as about fishing lines and family bonds. It’s a great mercy that this gifted poet created a fecund estuary of ritual and story out of a disappearing one. He does not exhort or boast revelation but gestures again and again toward that shimmer of saving connection.”

—Martha Serpas, author of Double Effect: Poems

“Like saltwater mixing with the rivers of the gulf, Nicholas Molbert’s Altars of Spine and Fraction blends the myriad complexities of the American South with grace and beauty. These coming-of-age poems mark the borders of innocence and experience in powerful and memorable ways. Each poem arcs into the water, and I am consistently amazed at what Molbert’s poems manage to pull ashore.”

—Adam Clay, author of Circle Back: Poems

“A place leaves traces. Some places ingrain so deep, they rupture our cells and forever swim inside us. In Nicholas Molbert’s illuminating first collection, Altars of Spine and Fraction, the ocean tides of place and memory roil in both the ecological and anatomical landscapes. Molbert’s poems ruminate on an upbringing in Louisiana—where place and person wail out songs of struggle, of fortitude, of erosion, of a father whose first ingredient with every meal was quiet, of grief, of mercy, of belonging to the water, of formative ideas on masculinity/toxic masculinity, of absence, and of ecological love from a descendant of an oil fracking worker—and the aftermath of becoming and loving that ensues. This ecopoetic collection stares down biological and environmental inheritance and asks, ‘What now to praise?’ The poems answer back: Look, look at all this prayer—prayer found in the spoonbill’s articulation, baiting minnows, ‘encroaching coastlines,’ a night’s birth in ‘asphalt fog,’ floating in the canal, stretching syrup with tap water, ‘landscapes turn to elegy,’ rig idioms, wormholes and avocados, the trout in the pelican’s throat, domesticity of lovers, cattails bowing to refineries, and the hurricane’s voice wheezing ‘we are anything but quiet.’ Belief becomes the sinew of place, memory, personhood, and the act of writing poetry. Here, hurricanes not only speak, but instruct the poet on how to break—line, thinking, coast, family, canvas, and the heart. Molbert reminds us, ‘voice, at its bones, is friction,’ as these poems lull and unsettle, conjure and dissipate, transforming to friction-full tides pulling us across the page.”

—Felicia Zamora, author of I Always Carry My Bones